It is the time of year when we tend to do MORE when in fact LESS is what we really need to do.

In terms of our thinking, let’s review how we may conceptualize MORE and LESS.

We obtain MORE when we think about gathering information, developing insight, processing our thoughts and activating our ideas into fruition.

In terms of LESS, (coming from a positive perspective), we save ourselves energy, frustration and wasted productivity, when we are doing LESS ruminating, worrying, obsessing, delaying and ignoring, or dreading.

Sometimes instead of actually doing and working on MORE we may want to focus on doing LESS.

One response to “Thinking about More or Less”

A corollary of Terry’s valuable paradox is that the harder you work the more fun you need to have. I’ve observed this to be especially true on the group level. Look at teams at work, in the military or in athletics. Those teams which are having the most fun are also much more likely – and paradoxically – to be working harder and excelling more. In short, if you work hard you need to party hard. When I was in the Air Force and attending Squadron Officer’s School (SOS), I experienced some empirical backing for my hypothesis. My flight was a very fun-loving bunch of 12 male and one female Captains (SOS consisted of 64 flights each made of 13 Captains). We jokingly redesignated the acronym DG (“Distinguished Graduate”) as “Did Golf” and many of our guys did play golf. We were just laughing a lot, relaxing and enjoying SOS. What’s amazing is that over a 3 month period we developed winning ways and in the end received first place or the Chief of Staff, which is the #1 flight out of 64 flights. The competition for this honor was fierce and was determined by a wide range of competitive criteria such as team problem solving skills, athletic competitions and academics. What’s amazing is our final athletic competition of volleyball. We needed to win to stay in contention for top honors, but never did it look more hopeless when after 2 (best of 5) games we had been soundly trounced by the opposing flight with humiliating scores of 21 to 5 and 21 to 9. Then we suddenly became inspired and defeated the other stronger and bigger team over the next 3 harrowing games by 2 point margins in each game. It was as if the whole future of the world depended on our winning. But we were still in the “having fun” mode! We won because we had more fun!

I did read Terry’s linked e-mail to her earlier posting. Once possible source to investigate for this concept of “the more I know the less I know” is the great physicist and mathematician Issac Newton. Newton said, “What we know is a drop, what we don’t know is an ocean.” He also compared himself to a young boy interested in pretty shells on the beach but not understanding what was out in the ocean. This is tremendous humility to come from one of the greatest intellects and scientists of history, yet he echoes the underlying truth of the concept for which Terry was advocating of the more we know, the less we know.